May 24, 2011

LoPan, how did you manage to get that ship onto the land? (The Great Wyrm is mine.)

Later in that same game, Horus had a stack of four shamans out in the middle of the water with no spells on them. I couldn't figure that one out, either.

I've gotten stuck in a rut always playing the Draconians. A month or so ago I tried beginning games as Dark Elves and as Dwarves, but I got killed almost immediately. The Draconians are the easiest Myrran race to play IMHO.

Today, though, I'm trying a game as Trolls. Having a hard time starting with those, too, but not as bad.

The big thing about Draconians is that once you get a wall of stone around your town, most raiders and wandering monsters can be ignored. They attack your town, see something flying in the city entrance, and just stand there.

That didn't happen with the Dwarves or Dark Elves, and eventually something came along that was too tough. (Usually a swarm of phantom warriors.) With the Trolls, at least, their units are a lot tougher than usual (a lot more hearts, shields and swords) plus even if they die they come back as long as you win the battle.

UPDATE: I had one game where something went seriously wrong with the database. Certain enemy units had every intrinsic special in the book: invisibility, invulnerability, large shield, you name it. It took something like five clicks to page through them all.

UPDATE: I had memories from long ago of taking a stack of War Trolls and pretty much romping through everything on the board. Now I'm finding out that my memory wasn't wrong. A stack of 8 elite War Trolls defeated two Great Drakes plus a ton of helldogs in a red node, and that's not easy.

And the only magic I had on them was Water Walking. No Stone Skin or Iron Skin, or Elemental Armor, for instance.

I started this game with all green books, but I've found four black books so far. Someone talked about taking War Trolls and casting Black Channels on them. It doesn't strike me as being as good as Lionheart, but it's also cheaper, and if I get that spell, I'll give it a try.

1
Maybe he used Flight, moved the ship over land, and at some point cancelled the spell?

Posted by: metaphysician at May 25, 2011 05:14 AM (hD30M)

2
I don't know how he'd do it with 5 adjacent water squares (45 ships), but one other way to do that is to build a ship with no adjacent empty water squares for it to appear in; it would just appear in an available land square. (That may be fixed in 1.31, and I'm remembering way back to the 1.0-1.2-ish versions of the game.)

Units stranded over water... windwalkers and ships interact oddly, so if they crossed paths, they might leave units stranded on a water square. (Different-speed ships may also do that.) I know I've had windwalker-led stacks who would "vacuum up" walkers they moved over, or who would sprinkle slower units behind them, depending on how they moved. And if you didn't have Myrror locked down, he might have dorked up a planar shift spell, or the spell that makes a city into a planar tower. (Horus is blue/white, right? So he could potentially have all the planar spells plus windwalk, plus Jaer.) There's probably a way to do it by killing/dismissing a boat, too (6 shamans riding 3 triremes, 2 triremes get killed... 1+2 sail off and leave 4 shamans treading water?) I'm pretty sure canceling waterwalk (or flight) on a unit over water drowns them, though.

And I doubt the computer has code to "rescue" stranded units (considering he can't stop himself from filling one-square lakes with triremes or constantly transmuting special map squares back and forth), so once it happens, they're there until you take mercy on them and kill 'em.

Units getting extra intrinsics: there are some overflow bugs in the game. Give a hero or magic item too long a name, and it can walk off the end of its buffer and do interesting things like that. And MOM's memory management is kinda-subpar anyway; I'm sure the game can do this to itself as well.

Posted by: Mikeski at May 25, 2011 01:36 PM (GbSQF)

3
The ship-on-land bug is one I've encountered before, and the game started crashing badly soon afterward. They'd actually move across land, but if they encountered anything (or I attacked them) the game would crash. It finally got unplayable, and I had to start a new one.

I'm having a similar issue in this game, except that my treasury, mana, income, mana generation and food production will all go to 0. It started right after Baghtru had this problem...

And yes, I smashed a few cities before I saved the game, and he reverted.

May 13, 2011

MOM thoughts

So you're playing a red game, and you're sailing around a Great Drake, butchering everything you come across. One of the things you attack is a pile of triremes belonging to Merlin. Here's the question: If he uses Web on the Great Drake, does it splash and drown?

I don't know. I got paranoid, so I put Water Walking on the Great Drake just in case. But it didn't matter anyway, because Merlin didn't have enough mana to cast any spells during that battle. Still, I'm curious. Would that kill the Great Drake? Or would it effectively get water walking for free?

I've been trying to mix up my starting setup, just for variety. I'm pretty much hopelessly hooked on being Myrran and playing the Draconians, but that still leaves a lot of opportunity. I spent some time playing a variety of different magic colors, but in the end I really love Green too much. (With, or without, a bit of white for spice.)

A couple of days ago I started messing around with different retorts. One interesting game was 2 white, five green, Myrran and ArchMage. Getting Archmage late in the game doesn't really do too much, but starting with it is incredible. My skill level grew enormously, and it really did make a difference in the game.

But the game I just played was even more fun: Myrran (obligatory), 1 blue, 1 red, 5 green, and Node Mastery.

Node Mastery is scary powerful. Getting it late in the game is great, but starting with it is obscene.

In particular, what it meant was that I could use Web and Crack's Call in every node I attacked, which made a huge difference. So nodes were easier to conquer early, plus giving twice as much power as normal. It's overwhelming, because of course having lots of mana means your skill rises and your spell research accelerates and you can carry more continuing spells and summons.

1
Yeah, I can see how that would benefit. The tradeoff would be, of course, that you pretty much have to go after nodes. Which can suck if you draw a bunch of nodes with really nasty stuff ( air elementals, illusionary warriors until you have true sight or potent ranged attacks, any critter in large enough numbers to make Cracks Call unviable ).

Posted by: metaphysician at May 13, 2011 08:44 PM (hD30M)

2
I've been playing on Hard for the first time lately, and it's been a pain. This is my third try at an all-white start, and I only succeeded this time because I saved on the first turn and was able to go back to it, knowing where the towns were, and where the best spots to settle were.

I summoned up four of the big spirits, and used them to knock off two of those, settled the two best spots and played defense for a couple hundred turns, until I got Paladins. Unfortunately, Jafar's in the game, dispelling my enchantments, and S'sra has Great Wasting running. I don't have any of the major city-boosts yet.

My retort is Warlord... come on, Altar of Battle! If you get that early, it's utterly devastating. Ultra-elite units out of the gate.

But all this discussion makes me wonder if perhaps the REASON the game works so well is BECAUSE it's not totally playtest balanced out the wazoo, and there are so many ways to give it a shove over the tipping point.

Nope, but the great drake can't move. It just sits there on the surface of the water while the triremes rush up and slaughter themselves against it.

That goes for any flight dispelled during combat over water; the unit acts like it's perma-webbed.

Dispelling flight or windwalking outside of combat drowns the unit, though. Usually. When it's not acting all buggy.

Posted by: Mikeski at May 14, 2011 01:55 AM (GbSQF)

6
Mauser: No, more the opposite. It's relatively balanced in that there are so many ways. If there's one thing I hate in any game, it's the One True Path to Victory. (WOW fell into that, but it was more a social thing.)

The second thing is that the learning curve isn't in the rules or the UI, it's all in the strategy. That's what a game should be. Challenging to master, not to figure out how to play because of a gummed up UI or rules that define arcane in a decidedly non-magical way.

7
Yeah, about the only "required" strategy in MoM is mana supply expansion. You can't simply stay in one city and focus entirely on research, because all good in MoM ultimately derives from either mana supply or gold supply. You have to go out and expand, whether by colonization, conquest, or dominating mana nodes. Beyond that, there are a hundred paths to victory, each with their own pitfalls.

And really, that's not a bad thing. Can you imagine the boredom of a game where everyone spends the entire game turtling over three cities each?

*ponders* Would Web+Crack's Call work on them? Failing that, or putting together some kind of equally nasty stack, I think the only counter would be "disrupt the other guy's mana supply." Or maybe "rush the Spell of Mastery/Time Stop".

On a vaguely related note, I tried Master of Orion. It looks to be just as addictive as MoM. . .

It was 13 books: 3 green, 4 blue, and 6 white. I started with 3 green and 5 white.

In principle web and Crack's Call would work, except that enemy wizards can't do that unless they know where the wyrms are. So you use them by taking enemies out one per turn. Tunnel to a point where you're next to exactly one enemy, then chomp him. Afterwards, when it's the enemy wizard's turn, he can't see the wyrms so he can't attack them.

No unit, no matter what it is, can survive two chomps from a Great Wyrm, and that's how many you get each combat round.

4
I suppose if you had a whole stack where most of them have True Sight, that could let you target the Web+Cracks Call, but honestly, at that point you might as well just go with a heavily buffed stack of missile attackers ( 9 adamantium True Sight champion halfling slingers? ).

6
Actually, I don't think that would work, anyway. I doubt even that would let you kill both with 5 shots. . . and 5 shots is all you'll get, because the wyrms will kill four in the first turn, by my estimate. And if you don't kill *both*? No attrition at all.

Though I suppose if you combined the mega missile True Sight swarm with Web+Crack's Call, that might work. The Web might buy you a slight bit of time.

8
I can totally understand. That said, it makes sense this would basically win the game. After all, its probably about as hard to get started as Time Stop. It certainly costs nearly as much mana per turn, and without even most of the tricks you can use to reduce the cost of a single color spell.

Hmm. . . I wonder how these guys would do against Torin with Invulnerability, True Sight, High Prayer, Prayer, and an appropriate set of high end artifacts. . .

Posted by: metaphysician at May 02, 2011 07:50 PM (hD30M)

9
There was one battle where I lost one of them. The enemy was a bunch of elite pikemen. But they only bagged one, and regeneration brought it back.

I made a post here a couple of weeks ago telling how to get into the game.

It's a very complex game, and the learning curve is pretty steep. But if you can accept that you'll be bushwacked in your first few games, and treat them as learning experiences, you'll be surprised how quickly you come up to speed.

12
I've actually found its a similar principle as with MoO, which I only played after MoM. Though admittedly, MoO is simpler. It only takes maybe one horrible loss in MoO to get the feel of things, whereas for MoM, its two or three.

( oh, the MoO loss? Psilons, opposite side of the map, unmolested and with only one other rival besides me. By the time I started thinking war, they were already thinking "fleets of thousands of invincible death ships" )

Posted by: metaphysician at May 06, 2011 11:36 AM (hD30M)

13
The equivalent to that here is "Ariel with High Men on a big landmass." You better respond quickly.

April 28, 2011

I tried a game against four opponents where I never left the Myrran plane, and had Planar Seal running the entire time. I won it with the Spell of Mastery.

Along the way I managed to accumulate 3 blue books, and lucked into getting Suppress Magic. Thinking that it might distract the other wizards from trying to get rid of my Planar Seal, I cast it.

I also had Detect Magic going, and for a while I used spell blast to stop all attempts at Disjunction from my four friends.

But eventually I started casting the Spell of Mastery, so their disjunctions got to complete. And I found out something interesting:

Suppress Magic defends itself. A disjunction has to survive Suppress Magic before it can attempt to turn Suppress Magic off. And since Suppress Magic is like 1200 points, it's damned hard to get rid of it. No one ever did.

That, combined with the way it seriously cripples the enemies, makes it pretty major league.

Playing the way I do (Myrran, white and green) means that having a lot of enemy wizards is an advantage. This particular game, I ended up being able to trade spells with all four of them, and I did so several times.

1
What are your guidelines for spell trading? More particularly, how do you determine whether a particular spell is "safe" to give away, versus a spell that you know you'll regret giving to another wizard?

Pretty much, if I know it's something I use a lot against someone else which can harm them, then I don't want them having it to use against me. It's all based on experience.

Against a red wizard, I don't give them Awareness, for example, because red magic has attacks against cities from range, and Awareness allow them to target me. I also don't give them Corruption, Call the Void, Chaos Rift, or Raise Volcano.

I don't give Nature's Awareness to green wizards, for the same reason. Also, no Earthquake.

I don't give Planar Seal to a white mage, because if they cast it and I want to come across, it's a headache.

Sometimes late in the game I go on a hunting expedition and take out all by one city for every opponent. In one game where I did that, one of the crippled opponents was taken out by raiders, but it wasn't the last one.

April 24, 2011

MOM -- Torin the unbalanced

Someone around here referred to "Torin the Incarnation" as "Torin the Unbalanced". I have never summoned Torin before, so tonight I was playing a 2Green6WhiteMyrran game, and found the Incarnation spell in a lair and decided to give him a try.

Unfortunately, by that point I'd mostly cleaned out Myrror. The good side is that I had a good storehouse of magic items. So there he was with 20 experience points, and this is what I did to him:

And because of the interaction bug between Path Finding and Water Walking, he was zooming around at 14 squares per turn. And obliterating everything in his path.

A Sky Drake did about 12 points of damage to him, and got obliterated. 3 air elementals managed to do 4 points of damage to him. Nothing else could touch him. I eventually sent him to Arcanus, just to find things to do to gain experience points. By the end of the game his stats were completely preposterous, and he had a higher spellcasting ability than I did.

There are a bunch of things he's got that make it so that things in the pile with him all get to be better than normal, but he didn't need the help, and they would just have slowed him down. (Waaaaay down. 14 squares a turn on his own!)

Man, he really does unbalance the game, if you can put either Flight or Water Walking on him.

The one thing I was worried about was whether Merlin had Crack's Call. Fortunately, he didn't. Yeah, if he'd used it successfully, I could have summoned Torin again, but he wouldn't have had all those marvelous items I gave him. Those would be gone.

2
I've toyed with him before, but the way that you used him (massive amounts of gear and persistent buff spells) is pretty much the only way he's useful. In a turtle/tech rush, you can easily get him before you really have the ability to make him uber; in that case, he's considerably less useful.

I admit that I have something of a bias, as well; I like massed casters and casting heroes, because they start kicking tail on Round 1 without leaving their starting position.

Posted by: BigD at April 25, 2011 07:22 AM (LjWr8)

3
All heroes, even Torin, will suck when unleveled, unequipped, and unbuffed. It's best to summon/recruit them early, stack them with an armsmaster, and let them reach at least level 5 (level 3 in Torin's case) before sending them out alone and unsupported to single-handedly clear out a nest of Sky Drakes.

5
Wouldn't losing him to any "destruction" spell like Cracks Call send the items back to your tower? ("At least one hero has died, you must re-allocate items.")

Any hero with massive movement is dangerous, Torin is particularly bad from the interaction with his (innate, undisspellable) Immunity/Magic and the easily-cast Invulnernability. (also a White spell. If you've got Summon Incarnation, you probably have Invulnerability as well)

Stream of life eliminates unrest in the city it's cast upon, which doesn't sound too impressive...until you realize that you can put your tax collection slider to full without ill effect...and that you can convert money to mana via alchemy.

Essentially, once you get stream of life going in all your major cities you and turn the tax slider to full, you'll undergo an explosive growth of mana and production (via buying things). Put your magic sliders entirely into research and skill and you'll quickly become crazy powerful. Meanwhile, use the massive quantities of money you're making to buy buildings and boatloads of expensive units (I recommend paladins) and then use all your converted mana to keep them enchanted constantly.

Even better, this strategy has a great synergy with white magic. Prosperity will increase your already insane income by 50%. On top of that you can use altar of battle and crusade to churn out super elite units and then enchant them. Throw in Torin and archangels to lead your massive "conventional" armies and no-one will stand a chance.

Oh, and stream of life makes captured cities instantly productive by eliminating unrest, boosting population growth, and instantly healing the units you used to capture it. Your empire will grow explosively if you are expansionist.

The only disadvantage with this strategy is that constantly converting money to mana is very tedious, since the game's limit for a single conversion is pretty low compared to the amount of money you'll be bringing in. Alchemy is recommended.

Try it out.

Posted by: urusan at April 25, 2011 01:57 PM (dt+dm)

8
You know, that would be a good question: which color of magic has the fewest Rare and Very Rare spells that are total gamebreakers if used properly ( and not properly countered )?

Posted by: metaphysician at April 25, 2011 04:19 PM (hD30M)

9
Grey Magic. Awareness, Summon Champion, Create Artifact, and Spell of Mastery (which is naturally intended to break the game) are all you get.
Of course, those are also practically the ONLY grey magic rare/very rare spells, and you can't avoid having them all really. Among the colors, Green probably has the least rare game breakers... though it does have common and uncommon game breakers, Web and Cracks Call. I'm actually pretty sure every spell from rare onward were intended as game breakers, though, but some fell pretty far short of that expectation (Flying Fortress).

TD, Herb Mastery is an amazingly powerful spell for Green. It means you can have multiple combat stacks involved in heavy fighting every turn, because everyone gets healed automatically. Without that, the gating limit on your ability to engage in conquest is how fast you can cast healing spells, or how fast your units heal on your own.

The Great Wyrm is the best (and most expensive) summon in the game.

Nature's Awareness is a huge intelligence advantage. No one can sneak up on you, and you can tell exactly where the best place is for your own units to sneak up on someone else.

And I think that Regeneration is terrifying. One thing I love to do is sail around with a stack consisting of three Great Wyrms, each of which is a regenerator.

And when you're against Tauron or Rjak or Sharee, Nature's Wrath is extremely effective. They'll ruin themselves without you even lifting a finger (except for the 20 mana/turn upkeep).

I love Green magic, and I don't feel as if it's been shortchanged at the top level.

Well, that's only 5 spells out of 20. White has 15 game-breaking rare/very rare spells (pretty much everything except Angel, Arch Angel, Astral Gate, Holy Word, and High Prayer), Red and Black have at least 10 each I can think of, and even Blue has Air Elemental, Sky Drake, Spell Ward, Creature Binding, Magic Immunity, Haste, Time Stop, Suppress Magic, and Great Unsummoning, any one of which can ruin opponents that haven't reached Rare/Very Rare magic themselves yet.

Green gets game-breaking Common and Uncommon spells (Web + Cracks Call makes short work of even Sky Drakes, as Magic Immunity does nothing to prevent removal of their ability to fly or being swallowed whole). If they had any more game-breaking Rare/Very Rare spells, there wouldn't be much point to playing anything else, except for a challenge.

April 15, 2011

After the game begins, press F7 and choose "1.5 Gold" for your taxation rate. Go into the "Game" menu, choose Settings, and unselect "Random Events".

Right-click your starting city, and begin building a Granary. If you were lucky enough to get a food bonus (looks like a stag on the main map) then in your city, reduce the number of farmers by 1. On the main screen you want the Food display as low as possible without being red, at least for the time being.

Go into "Magic" and raise the "mana" bar to the top. Then go into "Spells" and begin summoning a unit of Sprites.

When they appear, go back into "Magic" and drop the "Mana" bar down to about half way. Then use your sprites to explore the map. They move two, over all terrain types, and can see two squares away, so you can learn a lot very rapidly. Don't attack anything with them, because they'll die.

Somewhere in there you're going to need another unit of swordsmen. And don't forget to start sending out settlers to start new cities. (And send troops along, so your outposts don't get overrun!) Scouting unmapped territory with settlers is not advised. They're too expensive and too slow. Generally speaking, the best place for a new city is on a river. But you can use F1 to find out how good a particular square would be.

If B'Shan offers to work for you, take him. He costs 100GP initially, but he gives you 10GP per turn for as long as he's on your team.

If Zaldron offers to work for you, take him if you think you can afford him. He costs 100GP initially and costs 2GP per turn after that, but he helps you research new spells faster.

If Gunther or Brax offer to work for you, tell them to take a hike.

If Serena offers to work for you, that's a judgement call. If she is a sage, then probably yes if you can afford her. But even without that, as a healer she's very handy as a field campaigner.

If you end up really low on money, you may need to spend a few turns with your city on "Trade Goods" building up your treasury.

Save your game often!

As you build up, you'll reach the point where you can afford to build a campaign stack. You might choose to include one or more heros in it. You might want to include one or more summoned creatures.

If you win a node, be sure to summon a "Magic Spirit" (or "Guardian Spirit"). Move it onto the node, and then choose "meld". Once you do that, the area around the node will start sparkling. This means it is adding mana to your income.

This advice is just to get you started. Later, as you learn more about the game, you'll begin to understand these things better and may choose to follow different strategies.

Huh. I can't remember the last time I played orcs. Do they have fast growth, or something?

Posted by: BigD at April 15, 2011 11:33 AM (LjWr8)

2
Honestly, I'd recommend Halflings for a starter race. They are easy to keep happy, productive, have the best missile weapon unit, and no meaningful disadvantages until the very end game ( lack of certain buildings ).

Orcs are the vanilla race. They have decent units, average performance, and all the building types. Every other race is designed to be "better than orcs in some ways and worse in others". If you're trying to learn the game, I figure that starting with the average race is the best way.

Starting with the halflings, you may learn habits which make it so that you can't ever really play anything else.

4
All races can get in ruts... Orcs are one of the more challenging races, as they're slow to develop like High Men and High Elves, but the payoff at the end is nowhere near as good. Wyvern Riders have the Flying ability, but that's all they have, compared to High Men's magic-immune Paladins and the devastatingly overpowered Armor Piercing First Strike attacks of the Elven Lords. Orcs can actually build every single city improvement, though, which no other race can do (High Men lack Fantastic Stables, while Elves lack Parthenons). Orcs are best if you want all your cities generating such enormous piles of gold and mana by the end of the game that you never have to worry about running out of gold and mana to support a vast army of combined magical and mundane troops.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at April 15, 2011 02:07 PM (rf3Je)

5
General playstyles for other races:
Gnolls: This is the ultimate "I LOVE A CHALLENGE" race. Weak sauce in furry form. Wolf riders can be made quickly, but without loads of mojo they'll still be too weak to survive a fight with enemy pikemen. And the reason the cities can start building these "ultimate" units fast is because their cities have the lowest maximum upgrade level of any race... they can't even build a Library. Oh, and their units cost 50% more than Orc units.
Klacklon: If you're not starting off as Klacklons, you might as well just squish every one of their cities. They'll riot if your home tower isn't in a Klacklon city, and every other race in your empire will riot if it is. Playing as Klacklons is weird... their cities produce almost as much gold as a fully upgraded Orc city, thanks to their innate production bonuses; however, unless they have a magical resource somewhere in their city limits, they will generate almost no mana, since they can't build even a lousy Temple. Their ultimate unit, fire-breathing Stag Beetles, are pretty devastating for a fast-maxxing race, but grossly outclassed by just about any high-end summoned unit. Not a bad race for a zero-spell book run, or if you're just feeling contrary ("Master of MAGIC? HAH! We'll see about THAT!")

7
Am I the only one addicted to White magic Hero Stack of DOOM? Focus on recruiting the best you can get, level them, shower them with magic items, keep them healed in fights and watch them crush everything in their way.

8
Tat, you're probably using a browser like Safari, and not seeing the enhanced comment editor that all the mee.nu sites use. Unfortunately, that code doesn't fail gracefully on certain browsers, and if it doesn't load, your comment ends up as a single-paragraph blob. Manually inserting HTML

at the start of your paragraphs is an annoying-but-effective workaround.

The entertaining thing about white magic is how hilariously weak its summoned creatures are (except for one, who technically is a hero not a summon), but how devastatingly powerful it is at improving units built using a more Civilization-style approach. As den Beste said, the white lairs with all the UBER LEWT are guarded by arch angels at the worst, and it's not like they can heal your middle- to late-game armies to death.

Black magic, of course, is the exact opposite... their high end units are lethal, evil, and worst of all, cheap. It's not unusual to find a black lair piled high with a full stack of death knights or demon lords, and even the middle tier will often have wraiths (incorporeal, immune to weapons, life stealing). The only good thing about them is that they can't heal (except by draining life), so eventually you'll cherry tap them to death if you can keep sending in units that can do more damage than they can leech.

Lizardmen are quite a challenge, too, because they are severely limited on buildings. On the other hand, Dragon Turtles are surprisingly good units. They're a lot cheaper than Stag Beetles, and nearly as good. And they're water walkers, a huge advantage.

Halflings are pleasant to play, and their slingers are among the best units in the game. But they only have one trick, and it doesn't work on everything. A lot of units are missile-immune, particularly wizards. The rest of the Halfling units are relatively weak. On the other hand, they like everyone and everyone likes them, so running conquered cities is easier. And they produce more food than anyone else, which is useful.

The biggest disadvantage of Halflings is that they can't build ships. So you better have green or blue magic, or luck into a Wind Walker hero, or you're going to be stuck on your initial land mass.

Lizardmen: Swimming settlers. Get one spread onto every little island you can, and you can become a real bugger for your opponents to uproot. The swimming units are also great for the militaristic play style that likes to win by smashing every enemy city as fast as possible, but you WILL need to be fast, because almost all the other races have land units that can turn your dragon turtles into turtle soup. They can't even win a one-on-one fight with a stag beetle. You might be able to smash their ships with ease, but if you can't take their cities you'll just be delaying the inevitable. Use them in a world with a small land size, and hope none of your opponents start on Myrror.

Barbarians: These guys are the "hard mode" for city-building players, as opposed to the gnolls' "hard mode" for conquest players. Barbarians are slow to grow and lacking in productivity, but their high-end berzerker units seem almost tailor made to take down wyvern riders and other melee-based flying units, either as the attacker or the defender, and be effective in combat against very little else. All their units, except cavalry, are restricted to a movement rate of 1 unit, and the cavalry's throwing axes that are only half the strength of the berzerkers. I honestly don't recall the last time I played as a barbarian race, but I do think there was something that saved them... maybe their throwing weapons could be enchanted along with their regular melee attack?

Halflings: The "uber defense, epic fail offense" race. Prodcutive and fast growing, these guys will make developing your empire a snap, and they can produce their high-end slingers very early. Slingers, for their part, are simply devastating little rock-flingers... except that most of their advantage comes from their extra two figures per unit (33% more than the next largest ranged unit, Bowmen), which means that once they start taking damage, their attack power will go in the toilet, fast. Much more effective when they're protected by a city wall, or better yet, a wall of shadow. Much, MUCH less effective when an enemy is protected this way, allowing his ranged attackers to take down your slingers while remaining relatively safe. And don't even get me started on air elementals...

Ah, I forgot about that combo of awesome, Black Magic Anything + Regeneration. Fortunately shadow demons aren't too hard to kill, as their only other tricks are flying, ranged attacks, and immunity to webs. Black Channel War Trolls FTW!

As for halflings, I thought they could at least build triremes? Can't carry a full stack, but at least you could get a settler and spearman across the sea...

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at April 15, 2011 05:37 PM (4njWT)

13
High Men: Decent early game, strong late. A good, sturdy, balanced race. No 1-figure super-units, but paladins can be fun, and there's little that I love more than a 9-stack of elite (or better) magicians raping everything in their path.

Posted by: BigD at April 15, 2011 06:48 PM (LjWr8)

14
I actually found the Archangel served decently well as a singular wandering doom unit, provided you have some of the upper end White buff spells. The Archangel may not have much special, but when he's benefiting from High Prayer and Holy Light, not much other than singular uber units can hurt him. Maybe not an unbeatable weapon, but useful for mopping up lesser cities that are scattered about.

Admittedly, the game I used this tactic was not a usual progression. I spent maybe 3/4ths of the game in a not-quite-desperate, but very much constant, defense against a constant stream of armies by all three opponents. I had the misfortune to spawn my capital fairly near to two of my rivals. Ugh.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 15, 2011 07:20 PM (hD30M)

15
Okay, you sold me. Interesting site, GOG, they even have one of my favorites, Evil Genius.

Posted by: Mauser at April 16, 2011 01:06 AM (cZPoz)

16
Is that "Random Events" thing why one of my biggest cities was destroyed with no warning, not by anyone, in the middle of my island, and with the wrong name? ("Lizard Caves was destroyed." (not the name of the city) "You lost 5 Fame") Clearly I was doing something wrong.

Posted by: Mauser at April 16, 2011 04:57 AM (cZPoz)

17
Nope, a city getting destroyed and labeled the wrong name is caused when a monster spawn from a lair or node enters an undefended city and obliterates it. The wrong name is a bug, but the destruction and fame loss is supposed to happen. It could have been an invisible monster spawn, like an air elemental from a sorcery node, or one with a move speed of 2 or more, so that you didn't see it before it wrecked your city.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at April 16, 2011 06:58 AM (4njWT)

18
You have to keep defenders in each of your cities, or you'll lose them. And not just token defenders (i.e. one spearman); it has to be a significant force. As the game goes on, the wandering monsters (out of lairs) and raiders (out of unaligned towns) get more and more nasty.

19
You know, that might be the reason why I still like playing MoM, while my copy of "Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri" is gathering dust. You can't just leave towns sit undefended, churning out money while you ignore them, and expect them to last forever as long as none of the enemy wizards can sneak a unit around behind your main army. Raiders and wandering monsters will pick apart your empire, one city at a time, if you try that. At the same time, maintaining a viable force in every city would bleed you dry, so you can't just set all your cities up to produce a pile of paladins and leave them sit there either. You need a global strategy to progress to the end of the game, adapting it to whatever unfortunate events get thrown at you, rather than just sitting around raking in money and mana and seeing how big your cities can get. I don't think there were any games, before or since, that incorporated such a natural and organic anti-turtling system that it didn't need to limit the game length to 200 turns, like most of the Civilization series did.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at April 16, 2011 07:25 AM (4njWT)

20
Huh. That's what I get for stationing my forces outside the cities.

Turtling isn't the only strategy. The real way to solve that is to go out and take down all the lairs and unaligned towns. And enemy wizards.

I tend to play as a Myrran, and in a game that goes well there comes a point where I don't really need to garrison my towns, because I've taken out every node, every lair, every city, and every tower. The cities don't need defending because there's no longer anything to defend against.

22
I usually explore-and-turtle. And, believe it or not, I actually leave many of my cities unguarded (even at the higher difficulties), especially in the early game, in order to maximize growth and exploration.

And yes, I do get bitten every once in a while, and sometimes even lose the game when a wandering monster stack hits my capitol. But, to be fair, there's not much that a swordsman and a spearman can do against a half dozen war bears, so I'm likely not really changing anything by sending them out.

I've taken a real liking to Myrran as well, for the same reason. There is a downside, though--the enchanted roads can really work against you, as monsters can use them to sack a weaker city without even giving you a turn to marshal forces.

Posted by: BigD at April 16, 2011 11:01 AM (LjWr8)

23
I tend to defend most of my cities with some combo of a decent melee unit, and one or two decent ranged units. Exact details depend on species, but typically its spearman and bowman/shamans early in the game, halbardiers and longbowman/wizards later ( depending on race, natch ). Its not many defenders, but its enough to usually stop the average attack, provided I suitably back it with buffs and battlefield summons. I get a ton of mileage out of all forms of battlefield summons, especially Air Elemental.

You burn mana when you get attacked, but its usually more cost effective than having more and better units defending.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 16, 2011 06:16 PM (hD30M)

24
I may need to print out the spell book too. When I get new ones, there's barely enough time to read it before it goes away. Also, is there a setting to run it in a window or something? (Then I could keep the pdf's open on screen) When my video mode switches, it ends up cutting off the top and bottom of the screen.

Posted by: Mauser at April 17, 2011 01:49 AM (cZPoz)

25
F3 brings up the "Apprentice". It shows what you're currently researching, but you can flip back from there and see every spell you already have. Right-click on a spell, and it shows you everything about it.

27
Yeah, I figured that out. I also figured out that alt-tab will break me
out of the full screen DOS window into any other App that's running,
putting the game into a window and letting me do other stuff.

Sometimes
it's a bit quirky to get units you've put on Patrol moving again, and
when the screen jumps to moving enemy units, it tends to jump back
before you figure out what you're looking at. Loading ships one unit at
a time is also annoying.

It was fun to cast Fly on catapults and send them out. There's still a lot I need to figure out about management.

There are a lot of cases where using spells on units results in something a lot different. I like flying Great Wyrms, for example.

In the MOM directory, there's a file called "dosboxMOM.conf" which controls how DOSBox runs. If you set "fullscreen" to false in that file, it will start in a window.

I also changed this one:

scaler=normal3x

That makes it run in a 3*size frame instead of 2* size. (I think that on Alcyone I had it set to "hq3x" but I don't have it available to check. That one is more CPU intensive, and this computer is slow.)

I decided to see just how good white magic could be, so I played Myrran, 2 green books, 6 white books, Draconians.

At a certain point I used Plane Shift to put one elite unit of Doom Drakes across into Arcanus, and then did a Planar Seal.

Eventually I had Endurance, Invulnerability, True Sight, and Righteousness on that Doom Drake, and after I'd mapped the entire Arcanus map, I decided to see what it could do.

Just that one unit, juiced that way, was able to take out every city belonging to two enemy wizards (Rjak with gnolls, and Raven with halflings), something like 12 in total. I couldn't believe it. Nothing could stop it.

And later in the game I had Crusade and Charm of Life going. I never got any decent summons, but with all that stuff going on I didn't need them.

The weakness of White Magic, though, is that keeping all those enchantments up can become expensive. So you need a large mana base to work with, and if the enemy can screw around with this ( *coughBluecough* ), you have problems.

At this point, I seriously regret the lack of a Master of Magic sequel with multiplayer, though multiplayer for a turn-based strategy game would be awkward.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 17, 2011 05:58 PM (hD30M)

32
No more than the entire Civ series. The lack of a sequel to this game boggles my mind.

As for windowed mode, mine always shrinks back down to 640x480, which is just tiny on today's screens. This 2x setting though, bears looking into.

36
Why no sequels? Same reason there are so many abandoned buildings in Detroit... the company that bought the rights to the game (Atari) did so specifically because they wanted to keep anyone from making a sequel. There was a company that wrote a full multiplayer sequel (Stardock, I think it was), but Atari not only refused to sell the rights but forced them to turn over all copies of the source code they were working on, last I heard.

Ubu, if I manage to come up with an Armsmaster, I plant him right outside my main manufacturing city. Each guy who comes off the line spends enough time with the Armsmaster to reach elite. If the Armsmaster is at +10 or +12, then usually the education pipeline is only about three units. Every time a new student arrives, an older unit graduates.

Usually it's Bhagtru, and I refer to it as "Bhagtru's school for wayward girls".

39
Tatterdemalion- See, this is why I tend to be of the belief that IP protection should require Use as a necessary component. Non-use of a protected IP for more than a certain amount of time should render the material public domain.

As for Elemental, what I heard was that the game was a good try, but poorly balanced and glitchy. Its possible the game might get patched up eventually, but the early word was bad enough that I won't be checking it before the 20 dollar bin ( figurative ).

Posted by: metaphysician at April 18, 2011 12:49 PM (hD30M)

40
One of the problems with MoM multiplayer is all the spells that are completely useless against other players. The actual number of spells that remain useful when you're unable to screw around with diplomacy is probably less than half the list, and very heavily weighted against blue and black magic. Hard to balance a game that way, and even harder to do without rendering all the elements copies of one another, or possibly a bog-standard elemental rock-paper-scissors game.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at April 18, 2011 02:38 PM (wwfmh)

41
Tatterdemalion- Could you explain further? I can sort of see your point, but I'm not sure I follow all your logic. Aside from spells that effect your diplomatic status with ( AI ) opponents, what other ones would be rendered useless?

a) there's no "diplomatic" victory scenario; the only way to win is... "Conan, what is best in life?"

b) the computer cheats. You can have all 4 opponents with aggressive/psychotic personality types, and run all the happy-fun spells you want, and they'll all hate you and have wizard pacts (or alliances) with each other if you're more powerful/advanced than they are. There's supposed to be a penalty on diplomacy for having white magic if the other wizard has black, or vice-versa, and Ariel and Rjak will still be on permanent friends-with-benefits status.

I've played the game off and on since it came out, and I think I've seen a wizard banished by another computer-controlled wizard exactly once.

The only purpose for spells like Aura of Majesty is to trade them to enemy wizards for something useful (and worth a few more points in the end game.)

As for sequels... well, if there was a good one, would there be a 42-comment thread about a game from an era when people knew what "EGA" graphics were?

44
Hmm... I remember there being a lot more diplomacy in the game than there actually was, I guess. Then again, I seldom played on any skill level beyond Normal... on Hard skill level, the computer players also become twice as tolerant of each others' attacks, while on Impossible, they never get angry with each other no matter what the other computer wizards do. I used to have a strategy guide that showed every single detail regarding how diplomacy and computer personalities worked... I think the most interesting revelation is that each time you contact them, it makes them angrier, so you always have to at least have a gift ready to offer them before you even bother talking.

April 14, 2011

I wish there were a way to tell the game, "I don't ever want to hire Gunther or Brax, so please don't ask me."

If you have magicians in a blue or green node, their fireball always works in "auto" mode.

Builder's hall, granary, smithy, market place, farmer's market, shrine, sawmill, temple, stables, animist's guild, forester's guild, miner's guild, parthenon, library, sage's guild, university, bank, and then trade goods. That's how I develop my Draconian outposts to best support the war effort. (And later, when their population goes up more, I'll tell them to build an oracle.) If it's intended to be a manufacturing site, then of course it also needs alchemist's guild, barracks, armory, fighter's guild, armorer's guild, and war college. And then either a wizard's guild or a fantastic stables, depending on what race it is.

I cannot live without the Wall of Stone spell, which is why I always take at least two green spell books. The wall of stone is simply too important, and it takes too long to build normally. At 50 MP to cast, this is one of the best bargains in the game.

Draconian airships aren't as good as I figured they'd be. Having ten ammo is definitely nice, but they just don't do all that much damage. For plinking at ground pounders who can't fight back, they're OK if you're not in a hurry, but against anything that flies or has rangestrike they just don't cut it.

I think that my favorite summon is the Colossus. It's fast, powerful, has excellent armor and lots of hit points, does melee really well, and its two rocks are impressive. Three colossuses can knock down a Sky Drake in one round (if they're lucky; four can do it even if unlucky), and they can melee with phantom warriors safely because they have first strike. The Colossus isn't the strongest fantastic creature in the game, of course (that would be the Great Wyrm) but it's versatile and can fight effectively against pretty much anything. The Great Wyrm is useless against fliers; the Great Drake can be, too, because it's only speed 2. The Sky Drake is formidable against most things and I would class it as the second best summon.

When I'm using predominately green magic and using flocks of draconian wizards, I looove fighting Great Wyrms. No danger, lots of treasure, and they're easy to take out with Crack's Call, if you cast it enough times. Of course, if they are accompanied by spiders, all bets are off.

My second favorite high-value monster defenders are big white lairs. 8 Guardian Spirits plus a unicorn would probably be dangerous as hell against ground pounders, but against draconian wizards they just stand there and allow themselves to be killed. And I've gotten spell books from such lairs. Lots of experience points, lots of treasure, and absolutely no risk.

I think that Red magic has more "cackle in glee" spells than anything else. Call the Void is really too good. If any of my opponents ever started using it I think I'd quit the game. Armageddon and Great Wasting are fun, too. Corruption is a cheap but effective way to royally screw up an enemy's logistics. And Chaos rift is a slow but effective way to render an enemy city completely useless.

IMHO the best "cackle in glee" black spell is Warp Node, which converts an enemy node from mana source to mana sink.

1
It really sucks to be on the receiving end of an Armageddon spell. For some reason, it seems to have a massive negative to your income if it's cast on you, although the rules don't say so..

I had one game go into massive failure when a wizard too remote for me to reach in two turns sent me to about neg 60, instantly. I was playing red/green (on hard) that game and had no way to dispel it. Game over.

New game (also hard), I'm playing all Death books w/no special abilities. It's working surprisingly well, but I think that's the geography more than anything. -- I was left alone on my continent until I developed Paladins.

Hmm... I'd say it's about as complicated as Magic: The Gathering, and for much the same reason. On the surface, it's pretty much straight Civilization, with spells replacing techs. But it's just different enough that, when you run into your first "BAM, you die in two turns" opponent, it can get really annoying trying to figure out how exactly the rules worked, or didn't work, to screw you over.

Among the differences:

- Every race (culture) is COMPLETELY different. None of that enforced equality between the Aztec and European cultures, your choice of starting race will affect everything in your game... until you conquer enough cities of a different race to start producing their units.

- Most units are multi-figure, which is different enough from Civilizaion or MOO that it can really mess up players when a single unit of enemy slingers wipes out their entire army of sky drakes, but when the player builds slingers they disintegrate when hit with a single fireball. Attack, defense, and health of multi-figure units are multiplied by the number of figures in the unit for the purpose of most attacks, with the disadvantage that, as the unit loses health, individual figures die, which gradually cripples the unit. Normally these units will die one at a time, say a unit of 6 spearmen with 2 HP each (12 HP total), when hit with an attack that does 5 HP damage, two of the spearmen will die, a third will be at half health, and the rest unharmed. Certain spells, like Fireball, deal small amounts of damage to each figure in the unit instead of massive damage to the unit as a whole, which makes them devastating against multi-figure units but practically useless against single huge units like dragons. The same unit of spearmen, hit with a Fireball for 2 HP damage per figure, would be obliterated.

- First strike attacks. Every time two units engage, the damage is inflicted in a particular order:

1. Attacker's first strike attack

2. Defender's first strike counterattack

3. Attacker's normal attack

4. Defender's normal counterattack

This is obviously most relevant in multi-figure units, as the defender will often have fewer units to counterattack with after suffering an attack. Interestingly, there are many melee attacks that count as first strike attacks, in addition to the "First Strike" ability, which replaces the normal attack/counterattack with a first strike attack/counterattack with the same damage. Thrown and breath weapons are essentially "first strike" attacks that take place in addition to the normal attack, and often have a completely different attack power or attack element that can't be enhanced like normal weapon attacks can. The attack power of this attack (per figure) is listed on the attack, such as "Fire Breath: 3" or "Thrown Axe: 2." This means that Barbarian units (which all have Thrown Axe attacks) can have nasty surprises in store for flying units that can normally only be hit by counterattacks or ranged weapons.

Posted by: Tatterdemalian at April 15, 2011 05:20 AM (4njWT)

5
I would say another factor is that, with the spells and mythic creatures and such, its easy to miss that, just like in Civilization, wars are typically won and lost before the first shot is fired. Its part of what makes White so potent; once you've gotten a few of the better spells, you can roll over almost anything because your civilization will just plain outpace them in everything.

White magic is easy to underestimate. I know that in games where I've found multiple white books, the game goes quite well. And Ariel (pure white) is always formidable, unless she gets stuck with a garbage race (gnolls).

Spells like Prosperity, Stream of Life, and Altar of Battle can really change the game. Charm of Life is really powerful, too, as is Crusade.

Green magic has a few of those, too. Gaia's Blessing is really nice on your cities, and I really like Herb Mastery. (I always cast that one as soon as I get it.)

Which is why Merlin (Green/White) is formidable.

Of the five pure colors, I think Jafar (pure blue) is the least formidable. Blue magic is quirky; it can do a lot of good things, but it's missing a lot of things you'd really like. (In particular, it gives you nothing to help your cities.) Blue works better mixed with other colors.

BKW, the game does have something of a learning curve, but you can actually get into it pretty easily, especially if you have played Civilization. It isn't really necessary to sit own and read both manuals all the way through before you play. Plus, the easiest setting in the game is really, really easy, and the game gives you hints when you're at that level.

Just remember: granary, city walls, marketplace, farmer's market, and shrine. Those are your first five builds for your capital. And for your first few games, pick the Orcs. They're the vanilla race, and they're pretty good.

I put it to the audience here: For a beginner, which premade wizard is the best choice? Me, I'd pick Merlin. He's got green and white magic, so you get support spells for your troops and spells to make your cities better, which makes you more likely to survive and enjoy yourself. And if you're lucky, you get some good summons later: either Colossus, or Behemoth, or Great Wyrm. Plus, you (probably) get Guardian Spirit, so you don't have to garrison the nodes you take.

But since green and white are my favorite kinds of magic, maybe I'm prejudiced.

8
Can't really say. I read enough of your posts that I wasn't really a total beginner even on my first game. Hence me going for Halflings. *cough*

If I had to pick between White and Green for a first color, I'd go Green, though. More useful summoned critters for the early game, and Nature Awareness. Making recon a non-issue is really good for a beginner.

Posted by: metaphysician at April 15, 2011 09:58 AM (hD30M)

9
Freya wouldn't be a bad choice for a starting wizard, either. Ten green books plus Nature Mastery gives you a huge discount on both research and casting, and I truly believe that Green magic is the best balanced one in terms of city spells, combat spells, summons, and enchantments.

"Of the five pure colors, I think Jafar (pure blue) is the least formidable."

Least formidable, but most annoying. Especially if you play against 3 or 4 wizards, he'll spend all his time casting True Disjunction against your world enchantments, and True Dispel (or whatever it's called) against your buffed up units every time you attack him. Black magic + mana leak (and a long running battle so it siphons him dry), or Blue magic of your own with Spell Lock is the only way to make fighting him not resemble a wrestling match with a porcupine.

I tend to prefer white + red for my roll-over-the-baddies games; Adamantine Righteousness'ed Flame-Bladed Holy-Armored Eldritch-weaponed Chaos-channeled (Ultra-)Elite hammerhands/slingers/paladins/your-favorite-four-to-eight-man-unit are just silly. Stick Torin in a stack with them and it's past silly and well into ridiculous.

April 04, 2011

So, having nothing better to do, I installed Master of Magic onto Arcturus and started to play a game. And I'm getting strange special events I've never seen before.

Twice now there have been "conjunctions", where one color of magical node becomes twice as powerful and the other two became half as powerful. And just now I had pirates steal half my gold.

In all the games I've played on Alcyone, none of this ever happened. What's the difference?

One possibility is this: in order to get the game to work under my normal user account on this XP system, I used the administrator account and made the whole MOM directory "full control" for all users. I never did that on Alcyone, and I wonder if that's what's different?

1
I've always had those events; is it possible you're playing on a higher skill level now, and they don't occur on the lower ones?

It's also a part of the game's "AI"... the bad mojo always befalls the human player. You'll have way more rebellious cities, meteor strikes, earthquakes, famines, and plagues than the computer-controlled wizards. (By a factor of about 10 to 1, in my experience.)

"Revolution" is one of the few semi-controllable ones; a city with a hero unit in it can't revolt.

I usually buff up one adventuring hero to lay the smack down on the tougher nodes and dungeons, and then try to hire the ones that offer research and coin bonuses and use them to keep my main unit-building cities in line (nothing worse than having to re-take your own city, and then have to rebuild the alchemist's guild and miner's guild and war college and ... before you can get back to cranking out adamantine paladins.)

I started with 8 green, then found two red, then found one white, and then got the Infernal Power retort. In practice it doesn't matter; Infernal Power and Divine Power are exactly the same. But it's still strange.

I'm noticing a lot of bugs in this game, things I don't think I noticed back in the 90's when I first spent a lot of time playing this. For instance, at one point I had a stack with 8 Draconian magicians and one Colossus. I had "pathfinding" and "endurance" and "water walking" on the Colossus -- and the entire stack moved speed 6.

The "pathfinding" bonus isn't supposed to apply to fliers, but it seemed to if the fliers were companions.

3
Its not shocking, though. MoM is pretty damn complex, conceptually, so its not shocking there would be glitchy interactions. And some of those probable-glitches are more like unintended features ( Fly on Floating Islands ) in effect.

What can I say, I'm very forgiving of glitches that don't actually break the game.

Given how many, many special powers there are, it's not massively surprising there should be a few strange interactions that they overlooked during their testing.

This was pretty low budget development, after all. The coding team was only four people. And one of them was Steve Barcia, and he has to have spent a large percentage of his time on other things, like supervising the artists. (There is a huge amount of art in this, after all.) And talking to the manual writer. And dealing with Microprose. And...

February 28, 2011

Master of colossi

In my never ending question to answer the question, "How in hell do you reasonably fight Sky Drakes?" I found an answer today. If you're a high level green mage, what you need is a pile of colossuses, or is that collosi? Anyhoo, five of them fighting against fully three sky drakes in a blue node, and I won and only lost one colossus. Among all the things that sky drakes are immune to, it turns out that physical missiles are not among them, and Colossus thrown rocks pack a hell of a lot of punch. I killed two of the sky drakes before they got close enough to melee.

The third one died while killing one of my guys.

Of course, there was the other question I ran into today: what do you do about a node which contains a Djinn and nine seven air elementals? Well, the answer to that one turned out to be four Behemoths, all of which had True Sight cast on them. Amazingly enough, I didn't lose anyone in that battle.

5
In the game I'm currently playing, oddly enough the key to solving my various problems was "spam Resist Element." Mainly because all my enemies tended to fill their cities with as many shamans as they could fit. . .